Past blurbs from the “Hear Ye” sidebar section. Urgent town crier missives, now lost to the winds.
2024-07-20: Quick DFRPG tip for a very minor situation: The cleric/holy warrior Holy ability Heroic Feats boosts ST, DX, or HT by +1d or +2d. That’s fine, but give a player the character creation option of a flat (and, yes, slightly generous) +4 or +8 bonus instead.
The benefits are more fun from solid bonuses (rolling “+1 ST” is boring), and quicker action. A randomly rolled DX bonus presents no particular hassle in play. But rolling a ST bonus requires checking new damage, Basic Lift (and encumbrance), and HP for every random result; by contrast, a flat +4/+8 is a “compute ’em once and write ’em down” affair. Likewise, a random HT boost means calculating new Basic Speed, Dodge, and Basic Move every time; a flat +4/+8 means a dead-simple +1/+2 boost to each. Much easier!
2024-07-17: Interesting video in which two well-known weapon YouTubers run a big bunch of sword-vs-spear matches. Spoiler: The spear pretty much rules (except when failing miserably in one-handed use). Some aspects of the battles look well suited to GURPS combat, while the one-handed spear trials (maybe) support my idea that the Spear and Staff skills really should be One-Handed Spear/Staff and Two-Handed Spear/Staff. (Then again, an off-hand comment by Lindybeige suggests differences between the skills of two-handed spear and quarterstaff, though unfortunately no detail is given.)
2024-07-14: In the vein of my last post here, the Generic Universal Eggplant blog‘s post “Ode to GURPS” is another fine overview of the system that might hold power to persuade D&D-only players. As a fan’s personal love letter to the game, it’s naturally full of opinion – but many of those assertions do carry a ring of truth.
2024-07-11: I clicked on the video What If D&D Was ACTUALLY as Flexible as the Community Thought?, curious as to what it had to say about D&D. Surprise, it’s a video about GURPS – and one of the better intros to the game I’ve seen online. The enthusiastic presenter avoids the weakness of so many videos by not getting all bogged down in Basic Speed calculation or skill costs or dice mechanics (well, there’s not too much of the latter). Instead, he goes for the Big Picture of what the game is really about: building your own game, creating whatever sort of character you like, and… well, I won’t spoil his interesting conclusions, so give the video a watch. This may be a good vid to show D&D stalwarts who are reluctant to give something else a try.
2024-07-06: My “Ally Roster” RSS feed aggregator, reporting on the doings of other gaming blogs, was long silent… now, it’s back! (Scroll down a while, and you’ll see it in this sidebar.)
Let’s see how long it lasts before technical difficulties crop up again…
(Oh, and do tell me if you’ve got a gaming blog that I should add to this list of feeds.)
2024-06-19: Many a time, I’ve found the highly detailed GURPS (and its offspring) to be a step ahead of me on some clever idea.
Just now, I was writing up some curse effects for a game, and had a brilliant thought: “You know, shouldn’t properly cleansing a curse work like treating a disease, in that you have to diagnose it first to avoid a -5 penalty on treatment? Maybe using something like Occultism to ‘diagnose’ the curse?” “Absolutely!”, I answered myself, and began jotting notes for future testing.
But then I saw a little rules bit I’d missed on DFRPG Exploits p. 67: “Curse-like ones might call for Remove Curse, at -5 without an Occultism roll.”
So, the game beat me to it. (Then again, that line specifically addresses curse-like diseases. Maybe I still have a good idea in that any curse, unless its nature is already obvious, should call for an Occultism-based or other “analysis” to reveal clues to the curse’s nature and to avoid a -5 penalty on any follow-up cleansing spell or skill.)
2024-04-17: Over on the forums, I ask for point cost gurus’ input on a question of minor interest: What’s a fair cost for a generic +/-1 to be hit in combat? Come weigh in with any and all thoughts!
2024-03-06: The industrious easyGURPS YouTube channel offers a short overview of GURPS on square-grid and no-grid maps – including a lovely introduction to the official GURPS product of my own creation, the freebie GURPS Range Ruler. Which I guess I can now advertise with “As seen on YouTube!“!
Oh, and look, there’s a nice intro to the Range Ruler on the Japanese-language GURPS Wiki. It’s an international phenomenon!
2024-03-06: There was a lovely RSS feed here in the sidebar. It’s gone now; a broken (I assume?) update to the widget was doing to the site layout what a purple worm does to a 1st-level D&D party (hey, I’ve seen it). I’ll reinstate the RSS feed as soon as the problem is fixed.
2024-02-29: My apologies if you’ve recently had troubles viewing the site. Service has been spotty as the hosting service runs through an unusual number of upgrades and maintenance outages.
And it’ll no doubt happen again in the future, so your patience is appreciated. (Hey, it’s not like there’s some flood of new content to keep up with…)
2024-02-21: Support for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game waxes on. SJG recently released The Devil’s Workshop, which sends heroes to a Black Tower to battle demonic forces. And publisher Gaming Ballistic has just launched an already-successful campaign to fund Saethor’s Bane, a DFRPG adventure for either solo or group play.
Adventures await. Have at ’em!